Sunlight streams through the front door of the Beth Israel Cemetery Mausoleum on Sunday, ﻿The cemetery was established eight years after the Battle of San Jacinto.﻿

Photo By Michael Paulsen/Chronicle

Boy Scouts from the Congregation Beth Israel-sponsored Troop 806 present the Texas flag Sunday during the unveiling of a maker dedicating West Dallas Cemetery as a Historic Texas Cemetery by the Texas Historical Commission. Houston’s early Jewish families dedicated the cemetery in 1844, a decade before establishing Congregation Beth Israel.

The cemetery looks, presumably, better than it did in the 1800s, when one of its first capital improvement projects called for iron fences to keep out the wild hogs.

Congregation Beth Israel’s 1844 cemetery lies along West Dallas, in the shadow of downtown’s skyscrapers, between rows of newly built townhouses and the few remaining tenements that characterize much of the Fourth Ward.

On Sunday, marble headstones gleamed in the sun and a breeze ruffled kippahs as officials unveiled a plaque naming it a historic cemetery, certified by the Texas Historical Commission.

History buffs and members of the Beth Israel congregation reflected at the afternoon ceremony on the legacy of what is Texas’ oldest Jewish cemetery.

The cemetery was created by a group of about 20 Jewish families who came together in Houston in the 1840s; they dedicated the cemetery before founding a congregation 10 years later.

“One of the foremost obligations for a Jewish community is to form a cemetery,” explained Beth Israel Rabbi David Lyon. “The reality was that death waits for no one.”

“I just think it’s wonderful,” said Marsha Gilbert, a Beth Israel member who has four generations of relatives buried on the grounds. “We’ve got such a rich history, so many founders of Houston. People who immigrated from France and Germany, which I didn’t even know until I walked the grounds.”

She unlocked the door to the cool mausoleum, dimly lit by stained glass, which her great-grandparents had built in the 1930s, when her great-aunt died.

Her father is buried in a grassy plot outside. The retired Air Force colonel’s tombstone is engraved with a Star of David and the University of Texas Longhorns insignia.

“We’re all Longhorns fans,” Gilbert said.

City Council Member Anne Clutterbuck toured the grounds after a short dedication ceremony. “I love to see what people choose to put on graves,” she said, passing the headstone of Mose Morris, 1855 to 1931, inscribed “Born in New York, NY.”

Another grave struck her with so much poignancy that she wrote it down: Florence “Big” Efron, 1914 to 1958: “Courageous, loyal, beloved wife and mother.”

Near the back of the cemetery, the oldest graves are a testament to the hardscrabble lives lived in early Houston, when epidemics of yellow fever could level whole communities at once.

An 1874 gravestone shields both Nannie Raphael, 18, listed as “my wife,” and Samuel Raphael, 5 months, “my infant son.” Nannie predeceased her son by fewer than five months.